Regional Plan Association's 100-Year History on Long Island

RPA has always viewed Long Island as an integral component of the New York metropolitan region. The first Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs recommended an elaborate network of highways, railroads, and parks on Long Island, including what eventually became the Northern and Southern State Parkways.

Dozens of representatives from Long Island attended the unveiling of the Regional Plan in 1929, including the Nassau County Farm and Home Bureau Association, the Suffolk County Taxpayers’ Association, the North and South Shore Chapters of the Long Island Real Estate Boards, the Beechhurst’s Women’s Club, and town and village governments including Babylon, Cove Neck, Hempstead, and Long Beach.

Several of RPA’s early Board members had residences in Long Island. One of the first women on RPA’s Board was Harriet Barnes Pratt, who joined in the 1930s. Harriet was married to Harold Pratt and Frederic Pratt, Harriet’s brother-in-law, was one of the original RPA Board members according to RPA’s incorporation paperwork as well as the President of the Board of Pratt Institute. Harriet was an influential figure in her own right - she led the City Planning Commission in Glen Cove, was a Board member of the Horticultural Society of New York and the New York Botanical Garden, and worked on the 1939 World’s Fair with George McAneny, RPA’s president in the 1930s. Her family’s estate is now a public nature preserve.

The first Regional Plan had an interesting take on estates like the Pratt’s. Towards the end of the Plan, there is a section entitled ​“Adaptability of Areas for Country Estates,” which says that portions of Nassau County such as the Wheatley Hills section should be reserved for such purposes in order to provide private parks for nearby residents to enjoy from afar and preserve open space for the long-term, with some caveats.

Much progress was made on the first Regional Plan’s recommendations in the 1930s. Within four years of the plan’s publication, RPA noted that the Long Island State Park Commission had added 9,500 acres to its holdings, and that the park acreage in Nassau County had doubled. RPA also hailed the decision of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to create a Tri-State Treaty Commission to reduce pollution in harbor and coastal waters.

Many details about RPA’s work in Long Island after the 1930s come from the oral history of C. McKim Norton, an RPA President who was interviewed in 1980. According to Norton, RPA staff were surprised by the relentless pace of development in Long Island in the late 1940s. Much agricultural land was repurposed, and C. McKim Norton said it was a strategic error on RPA’s part to not fight harder to protect farmland, which could’ve checked development. As it was, RPA was unable to make headway against sprawl. Norton explained:

“What happened was that after World War II, instead of having a depression, we had a boom. Everybody was expecting a post-war depression. And the boom took the form of a lot of government-assisted housing in suburban areas. This is the VA-FHA boom. And a lot of people came pouring out of the Bronx in six-story apartments and older parts of Brooklyn and found their dream house out in Levittown, Long Island… But there was no relation between the sub-divisions. There was no shopping involved with it. That is, they didn’t build neighborhood units. They simply built houses in clusters, sub-divisions, and then they ribboned shopping on the streets. And this is why I was out talking with the Levitts, because we were always trying to stop this, but you never could get anywhere with it. We had all the planning books and planning instincts, but we couldn’t put it over, and we got run out of Long Island, almost literally run out. People were very unfriendly when we came in preaching the neighborhood unit gospel.”

RPA identified land that should not be built on - steep slopes, marshes, and soils of high agricultural value - and advocated for comprehensive community planning. It continued to discourage sprawl in a 1962 study and in the Second Regional Plan, and lamented the racially segregated nature of these developments in its 1979 report, Segregation and Opportunity in the Region’s Housing. RPA flagged that taking income into account, Black residents were ​“substantially underrepresented” in Nassau and Suffolk counties in absolute numbers, and at the census tract scale, Black residents were underrepresented in the southern half of Long Island extending to Brookhaven.

It was during this time period, in the 1960s and 1970s, that RPA embarked on its largest environmental advocacy campaigns in Long Island. RPA’s seminal 1960 report The Race for Open Space set off a new wave of park acquisitions in Long Island, including Fire Island, Lloyd Neck, and Moriches Inlet. The Race for Open Space was also cited in the introduction of the first federal aid for open space.

RPA contested with Robert Moses over the preservation of Fire Island. RPA President C. McKim Norton reflected on the advocacy campaign, noting that RPA was just ​“another little feather on the scale” and that it was truly due to local pressure that Moses’s plans for a causeway on Fire Island were axed.

“A hearing was held on it on a hot summer day at Jones Beach in a little meeting room that I didn’t know existed there at an awkward time of year and a long way to go on a working day, but we went down. I went down with Otto Nelson, the Vice President of New York Life, who had been the chairman of our Open Space Committee, as I remember, and was an active officer of the Regional Plan Association. To Bob Moses’s surprise, the room was packed with people, and it turned out that there were quite a few people from Fire Island who had come down. Half of them were in bathing suits and it was a pretty raggedy crowd, but quite vocal; and Otto Nelson and I were sort of lost in the shuffle, but we finally had our say. Bob Moses was so surprised and angered by this that he withdrew from the platform and sat in a little room behind the stage. It just happened that I was pushed to the side so far that I could see through the door into this room where he was sitting. There was just a table in there and a chair or two, and he was sitting and swinging his knee violently, irritated, while this meeting went on, and one of his deputies held the hearing.”

RPA battled Moses again over his proposal for a bridge across the Long Island Sound in the 1970s. In the first Regional Plan, RPA proposed a ferry route between Rye and Oyster Bay. Robert Moses proposed a causeway with several bridge spans, which would have tied in with the Cross Westchester Expressway. C. McKim Norton recalled in his interview that, as a sailor, he hated the idea of the Long Island Sound being hemmed in by infrastructure, but that he and the staff members recognized the more salient argument that a bridge would induce more sprawl in the region.

“So our argument was that this bridge was only wholly justified because of the added traffic it would induce. In other words, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, so to speak, and we quoted a lot of damaging evidence like this right from their own reports. All this came in at the very end of this controversy. Other people had fought it, but I think we put a little straw on the scale of an egg-headed argument, a broader regional argument, plus the revelation that this bridge was not necessary really, that it was a scheme.”

The plan for the bridge fell apart as Robert Moses’s power waned and the Connecticut element of the Tri-State Planning Commission did not approve it.

Breezy Point is also arguably RPA’s oldest park initiative. The idea of Breezy Point and the Gateway National Recreation Area actually originated in a Hyland Committee Report on parks around 1920 that RPA President George McAneny and Charles Dyer Norton, Chairman of Committee on the Plan of New York and its Environs, were involved with.

RPA continued its environmental advocacy in its Third Regional Plan, which proposed eleven regional preserves, including the Long Island Pine Barrens and the Long Island Sound, as well as a network of greenways

RPA’s transportation proposals have been as fundamental to our history in Long Island as our environmental advocacy. From the first highway and rail maps in the 1920s, RPA has been invested in the development of the transportation network. Members of the Committee on the Plan of New York and Its Environs advocated successfully for the creation of two parkways and two ​“heavy-duty highways” on Long Island. In 1983, RPA and the Long Island Association released a joint report, Long Island Rail Issues, which argued for a gradual reorientation of LIRR operations to serve more of Long Island’s internal needs. Building off this work, in 2002, RPA prepared a report funded by the Rauch Foundation addressing a number of transit issues facing Long Island. RPA noted how to make LIRR more effective in carrying people between Nassau and Suffolk counties, pinpointing the absence of a third track between Jamaica and Hicksville.

RPA continued to advocate for a third track on LIRR’s mainline that would make it possible to operate​“reverse” service on the Port Jefferson, Ronkonkoma, and Montauk branches. As part of a broad coalition, RPA supported the MTA’s efforts to add this new capacity in the 2000s, an effort that was ultimately derailed by intense local opposition. However, the Rauch Foundation launched a campaign to revive the project with a report written by RPA in 2013, How the Long Island Rail Road Can Shape the Next Economy. RPA continued to support Rauch’s campaign, which ultimately succeeded and broke the political logjam.

In 2018, LIRR broke ground on the Long Island Rail Road Expansion Project, which includes 9.8 miles of a new third track from Floral Park to Hicksville, new power substations, and modernized infrastructure. The Third Track is set to be completed by 2022.

In addition to its advocacy around a regional rail network, RPA also supported transportation megaprojects that would benefit Long Island residents such as the East Side Access project connecting the LIRR to Grand Central. East Side Access was a key recommendation in RPA’s Third Regional Plan, which generated momentum that ultimately led to the project’s approval and construction. Construction of East Side Access started in 2007 and the project remains under construction, with completion slated for 2022.

RPA has continued this tradition of advocacy around public transportation, housing and neighborhood planning, and the environment in Long Island. Between 2002 and 2018, RPA authored several reports for the Rauch Foundation’s Long Island Index initiative. This project focused attention on problems ranging from the decline of Long Island’s young population to the segregation in its schools and neighborhoods. It also showed the potential for change, from the capacity for new homes in village and town centers to the ways that investments in the LIRR could boost Long Island’s economy.

In a 2013 report for the Long Island Community Foundation, RPA found that, more than any other part of the region, Long Island had far fewer rental homes and was building the fewest townhouses and apartments. Hurricane Sandy revealed how scarce rental apartments were as thousands of suddenly homeless residents had nowhere to go. RPA warned that the shortage of affordable rental homes was straining Long Island’s economy and would make it much harder for the area to compete for jobs in the years ahead.

RPA has also maintained a focus on Long Island’s environment, producing action plans for specific areas, promoting greenways, drawing attention to the threat of sea level rise, and analyzing how to deploy buy-outs. In 2016, taking into account the latest scientific findings on climate change, RPA found that many of the major resilience policies, plans, and projects under development fell short of adequately addressing the long-term, existential threat of permanent flooding from sea level rise.

RPA featured Central Nassau County and the Inner Long Island Sound as flagship places in the Fourth Regional Plan, published in 2017.

Supported by the Suffolk County Industrial Development Agency, RPA has worked on projects in Suffolk County since 2014, including within Amityville, West Babylon, Route 110, Ronkonkama and Holbrook, to foster transit-oriented development, diversify housing opportunities, and create safer, more walkable environments and downtowns. RPA has also advanced place-based strategies to prepare Long Island for the future’s innovation economy including the Hauppauge Industrial Park, Babylon Industrial Study, and the implementation of a workforce training center at Brentwood.

Unfortunately, a gap in RPA’s planning work in Long Island has been its lack of sustained engagement with the original inhabitants, including the Unkechaug Nation and the Shinnecock Nation.

As RPA looks to its future, we hope to continue our research, planning, and advocacy in Long Island with all residents, both long-standing and new.